Summary
Set in a summer camp in Virginia, this play explores the mundane and subtle ways teenagers navigate grief and loss, emphasizing the everyday challenges of bereavement.
Sunday, April 20, 2025 at 7:00 PM Apr 20, 2025, 7:00 PM
There’s a real nugget of something here, but it needs some workshopping as a dramatic piece, and that feels so clear to me that I’m surprised it’s running in this big of a theater in its current form.
I haven’t been to grief camp, but I’ve had an adjacent-enough experience to have some read on this, and I felt like this show captured some really specific details that felt very true to life. There’s this inside-out intimacy to your relationships in these places; people from disparate backgrounds are drawn together by shared emotional struggle and pushed to therapy-speak at each other before they exchange names. It creates these intense ephemeral friendships where you make promises to each other (“when we get out of the slammer…”) that you won’t keep (or, worse, you do, and it goes badly). There were little scandals, and weird overshares, and the cafeteria food needed to be drowned in Cholula, and the day-to-day was so boring that we resorted to painting rocks, and my counselor acted like my friend but wouldn’t accept my request on Facebook. There were rituals as people came in and out. Newer folks transitioned into group leaders in time.
The hope is that, eventually, making people feel less alone will get them unstuck enough to keep making progress on their own. “When are you going to stop pretending like you’re broken?” is a really salient line that someone asked me once, too. And the answer is really, maybe, never - it’s hard not to incorporate grief as a tenet of your rebuilt identity, especially when your brain is in this critical phase of development.
For as effective as the show is at evoking a similar sense of place - the set and costumes are great too - I didn’t feel like the payoff ever really arrived. I’m struggling to summarize the story in my head, and I stayed awake for the whole thing, which is more than I can say for the woman next to me. The viewer is left to figure out a lot of the meaning of all this on their own, which feels like an exercise in false profundity. Just a really mixed bag for me.